Five years on, a shocking new trend has emerged from COVID: the development of a parallel health ecosystem for Gen Z. According to the new Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health, the 18-34 age group relies on peer-to-peer information, increasingly disregards provider advice in favor of friends or family and social media, and they are the most likely to allow politics to enter the previously sacred temple of medicine. Choices are made based on ideology instead of fact, with nearly half of young people saying they will not trust or will stop seeing a health provider based on politics. Nearly one third of young adults say that they would only give their own children some of the available vaccines, and these views are more likely to be informed by information gleaned from social media or others’ personal experiences.
Let’s set the context for this generation. Nearly seven in 10 young adults report that their lives were disrupted by COVID guidelines, from missing school to working from home, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: The Unseen Impacts of COVID. They feel left behind and discriminated against as a result of the pandemic. And according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, over 50 percent of young adults approve of hostile activism as a viable means to make change, including physical violence, online attacks, property damage, or using misinformation. According to The Unseen Impacts of COVID report, they feel vulnerable due to the pandemic, whether lonely and isolated (58 percent) or depressed and anxious (53 percent). One quarter of young adults say that because of COVID, they have decided not to have children.
Here are three critical trends found in the Trust and Health report for healthcare providers to consider when communicating with Gen Z and young millennials:
- Self-reliance—The younger respondent is twice as likely as the older to say that the average person who has done their research can know as much as a doctor. Young people are also twice as likely to heed uncredentialed advice (45 percent versus 22 percent for those 55+), with people without formal medical degrees having a big influence on health decisions.
- Source Credibility Equivalence—A fascinating finding is the parity among young people in their consumption of stories across traditional health media, podcasts/newsletters, and on social platforms (55 percent to 67 percent consume health media via each channel). A stunning 58 percent of young people say they regret a health decision made based on misinformation. Their biggest source of misinformation is user-generated content platforms (39 percent), followed by independent content creators (29 percent) and friends and family (25 percent).
- Sharing of Opinions and Experiences—Nearly 60 percent of young people share health-related news items, compared to 24 percent of those 55+. Nearly half (48 percent) of young people share personal health experiences online and 47 percent share their own health opinions online, dwarfing the participation by those who are age 35+.
The clear message to the healthcare community is that COVID has changed the game for communicators from inside out to outside in. Specifically, the elites are no longer in control of information, whether public health authorities or scientific institutions. Personal experiences cataloged on social media now carry enough weight to rival the believability of data provided by Government or even healthcare providers. We need to get facts into the social bloodstream as a matter of urgency, correcting misstatements and providing scientifically validated explanations that are easily understood by the public. This is the true public health emergency that must be treated with urgency.
Richard Edelman is CEO.
